Abstract
This essay has two parts. In the fi rst one I try to show the crucial importance of Husserl’s phenomenology ( Logische Untersuchungen and Ideen I ) in Ortega’s thought at least till 1929. In this period it is not an exaggeration to say that Ortega understands his philosophy as a peculiar development of Husserl’s theory of intentionality. After this date, and infl uenced by the publication Heidegger’s Sein und Zeit , he begins to consider Husserlian thought as the last and more refi ned form of idealism. The antidote agains it should be a philosophy of vital or historical reason, a form of non idealistic phenomenology, which is close to the existential one.
The second part of the text is a personal reading of Ortega’s theory of historical reason, this non idealistic phenomenology, in order to see its possibilities in the liberal/communitarian debate about the universality of human rights and the plausibility for establishing a moral hierarchy of the different cultural practices.
I thank Gema Rodríguez Trigo for her support during the preparation of this chapter. I should also like to express gratitude to Javier San Martín and, especially, to Jorge Brioso. Their suggestions and commentaries helped me to improve the essay. This text was elaborated as a part of a research project sponsored by the Spanish Department of Investigation, Science and Innovation (FI2009-11707).
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- 1.
Cf. Philip W. Silver, Ortega as Phenomenologist: The Genesis of Meditation on Quixote (New York: Columbia University Press, 1978); Pedro Cerezo, La voluntad de aventura (Madrid: Ariel, 1984); and, particularly, Javier San Martín, Ensayos sobre Ortega (Madrid: UNED, 1994); Javier San Martín, Fenomenología y cultura en Ortega (Madrid: Tecnos, 1998). Thanks to Ortega’s interest in phenomenology, it would be no exaggeration to say that Spain and the Spanish-speaking countries were the first to translate Husserl’s main works. One of the obligatory steps for the group of thinkers that gathered around Ortega, the so-called “School of Madrid,” was the study of phenomenology. Cf., in this respect, the sharp comments of his disciple José Gaos in his splendid Confesiones profesionales. Obras Completas XVII-Confesiones Profesionales. (México, D. F.: Universidad Nacional Autónoma de México, 1982), 59–85.
- 2.
José Ortega y Gasset, Obras Completas. Tomo IX (Madrid: Taurus, 2009), 1119 (My translation here and hereafter). English edition: José Ortega y Gasset The Idea of Principle in Leibnitz and the Evolution of Deductive Theory (New York: Norton & Company, 1971), 280.
- 3.
José Ortega y Gasset, ibid., 154–60; José Ortega y Gasset, “Preface for Germans,” Phenomenology and Art (New York: Norton & Company, 1975), 60–70.
- 4.
Herbert Spiegelberg himself, in his monumental The Phenomenological Movement, succumbs to these self-interpretations. And although he holds that Ortega is an admirer of Husserl and his main presenter in Spanish-speaking countries, he cannot be considered a “full-fledged phenomenologist,” someone who should be included “in the mainstream of the Phenomenological Movement.” Herbert Spiegelberg, The Phenomenological Movement. (Dordrecht: Martinus Nijhoff Publishers, 1982), 659, 672.
- 5.
Cf., among the classical readings, Walter Kaufmann, Existentialism: From Dostoevsky to Sartre (New York: New American Library, 1975), 152–53. For a recent assessment of a similar line, cf. Charles Guignon, “History and Historicity,” A Companion to Phenomenology and Existentialism, eds. Hubert L. Dreyfus and Mark A. Wrathall (Malden, MA: Blackwell, 2006), 555.
- 6.
Otto F. Bollnow, Die Lebensphilosophie (Dordrecht: Springer, 1958).
- 7.
Cf. José Ortega y Gasset, Obras Completas. Tomo I (Madrid: Taurus, 2004), 624–38, 642–52. English Edition: Ortega (1975), 78–115. In the “Prólogo para alemanes” (“Preface for Germans”), he says that he began to study “phenomenology seriously in 1912.” Cf. José Ortega y Gasset (2009), 155. English Edition: Ortega (1975), 61.
- 8.
Cf. José Ortega y Gasset, Obras Completas. Tomo VII (Madrid: Taurus, 2007), 429–534, 557–666. English Edition: José Ortega y Gasset, Psychological Investigations (New York: Norton & Company, 1987).
- 9.
José Ortega y Gasset, Obras Completas. Tomo VII, 643.
- 10.
José Ortega y Gasset, Obras Completas. Tomo VII, 658.
- 11.
Regarding the Dii consentes as a metaphor of the new philosophy, cf. José Ortega y Gasset, ibidem, 476, 662.
- 12.
This continuation between Ideen I and Logische Untersuchungen is a quite personal reading that can sometimes lead him to certain errors. Cf. footnote 15.
- 13.
Note that Meditaciones del Quijote, a work that contains the nucleus of his philosophy, was published in 1914, right between the two essays on phenomenology from 1913 and the two courses in Madrid and Buenos Aires on this same subject (1915 and 1916). In this sense, it is very significant that the maxim with which Ortega’s philosophy is usually identified appears in this beautiful text: “I am myself and my circumstance and if I do not save my circumstance, I do not save myself.” This maxim is nothing more than the expression and personal acceptance of the a priori of intentional correlation. Nor is it by chance that, in 1916, Ortega began to write a series of essays under the general heading of El espectador. In these we find sharp phenomenological descriptions of human life in the most varied situations. Cf. José Ortega y Gasset, Meditations on Quixote (New York: Norton & Company, 1961).
- 14.
Cf. José Ortega y Gasset, Obras Completas. Tomo VIII (Madrid: Taurus, 2008), 235–374. English Edition: José Ortega y Gasset, What is Philosophy? (New York: Norton & Company, 1960).
- 15.
One of the most notable misunderstandings affects the clear differentiation between eidetic reduction and transcendental reduction. Rather frequently, but not always, phenomenology is identified with the “intuition of essences,” in the fashion of realist phenomenology. Cf., for example, José Ortega y Gasset (2004), 652.
- 16.
José Ortega y Gasset (2008), 177–87.
- 17.
Some of the most notable texts containing this accusation are: ¿Qué es la vida? Lecciones del curso 1930–1931; Principios de metafísica según la razón vital. Curso de 1932–1933; Prólogo para alemanes; La idea de principio en Leibniz y la evolución de la teoría deductiva. The first two appear in José Ortega y Gasset (2008), 417, 639. The second two appear in José Ortega y Gasset (2009), 154–60, 1119–20.
- 18.
For the exclusion of the metaphor of the Dii Consentes from phenomenology, cf. José Ortega y Gasset (2009), 158.
- 19.
Cf. José Ortega y Gasset, Obras Completas. Tomo IX (Madrid: Taurus, 2009), 160. English Edition: “Preface for Germans,” 70.
- 20.
This is so much the case that, in an article from 1941 titled “Apuntes sobre el pensamiento, su teurgia y su demiurgia,” he identifies his historical reason with what is expressed in the first two parts of Die Krisis der europäischen Wissenschaften, published in the journal Philosophia in Belgrad in 1936. But since what Husserl says there does not fit Ortega’s interpretation of phenomenology from 1929 onward, Ortega states that this text is not really Husserl’s but is rather written by his disciple Eugen Fink, because in it phenomenology “leaps to what could never have come from it. For me, this leap of phenomenological doctrine has been tremendously satisfactory, because it consists of nothing less than resorting to … ‘historical reason.’” José Ortega y Gasset, Obras Completas. Tomo VI (Madrid: Taurus, 2006), 29. English Edition: José Ortega y Gasset, “Notes on Thinking: Its Creation of the World and its Creation of God,” Concord and Liberty, (New York: Norton & Company, 1946), 82.
- 21.
For a penetrating analysis of these articles, cf. Pablo de Lora, Memoria y frontera. El desafío de los derechos humanos (Madrid: Alianza Editorial, 2006), 94–111.
- 22.
Bhikhu Parekh, Rethinking Multiculturalism (London: Macmillan Press, 2000), 134, 135.
- 23.
José Ortega y Gasset, Obras Completas. Tomo III (Madrid: Taurus, 2005), 765. Translation mine.
- 24.
José Ortega y Gasset, Obras Completas. Tomo III, 762–63. Translation mine.
- 25.
José Ortega y Gasset (2009), 129; English Edition: Ortega (1975), 23.
- 26.
José Ortega y Gasset (2005), 771. Translation mine.
- 27.
Ibid., 772. Translation mine.
- 28.
Ibid., 757. Translation mine.
- 29.
I think that the similarity of this thesis with Husserl’s idea of Europe in Die Krisis is more than noticeable. This is why it is not surprising that, in 1941, Ortega, fully identified with the melody of the first two parts of this work, assimilating historical and phenomenological reason, as I explained above in note 20.
- 30.
Cf. Jesús M. Díaz Álvarez, “The Foundation of Morality and Normative-Cultural Differences. A Phenomenological Approach,” Interculturalism: Between Identity and Diversity, eds. B. Penas Ibañez & Mª. C. López Sáenz (Bern: Peter Lang, 2006), 107–30.
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Álvarez, J.M.D. (2013). José Ortega y Gasset and Human Rights. In: Embree, L., Nenon, T. (eds) Husserl’s Ideen. Contributions to Phenomenology, vol 66. Springer, Dordrecht. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-94-007-5213-9_1
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